Fly Fishing Is Fun

Wildfish Angler provides a fun day of fly fishing instruction for individuals or groups. A typical day begins with familiarizing yourself with the basic equipment of the sport, rods, reels, fly line, backing, leaders tippets, and finally flies.  The basic rod weights for trout, smallmouth, stripers, will be discussed, and the merits of your choice of reel, small or large arbor and whether to use a simple click & pawl, or disc drag braking system.

Next we conduct a casting clinic, you begin by learning the basic fly rod cast, the roll cast, and their variations cast and when you get comfortable we move to on the water casting instruction, where you’ll learn the basics of wading. You will now also learn to read the water, where fish most likely are, and what fish eat.

The rest of the day will be spent fishing and you will catch fish!

As a professional Montana , New York & Virgin Island fly fishing guide since 1989 with roots in both fresh and salt water my primary job is to get you into fish with a fly rod.

Beginners Encouraged, Women And Children Always Welcome

Beginners this is your chance to cut through all the wellintentioned layers of baloney and get the straight scoop, find out the difference between wild fish and stockies, between pretension and reality and have a great time doing it. You will catch fish, you will learn to read a river, know what productive patterns to use, and learn to do it all with a minimal expenditure of money, time, and effort, and a maximum of fun.

Come and fish deep in the forgotten cloves and kills of the un-crowded old colonial Catskills. Picturesque waters with tumbling waterfalls, misty mountains, crumbling stone ruins, and quiet ledge pools overhung with ancient twisted sycamores.

If They Aint't Wild They Ain't Worth Fishing

Simply put action is the key to what defines a great guided trip. The greater the fishing pressure the lower the fishing action. I won’t waste hours flogging sterile pools chasing dubious hatchery stockies. I do not pretend to just offer traditional dry fly fishing over rising trout. This is action packed "western style" alternative fly fishing for wild fish, be it stalking aggressive black bass with dry fly and streamer, hunting voracious stripers on their spawning run, or sight fishing for cruising carp the "golden bones" of fresh water rivers. The trout we will catch are more than just holdovers, they are survivors, they have to be, to tumble and hold their own in the same water with wild smallmouth, rock bass, and red breasts.

Get On A Fast Track To Fly Rodding Now

You can literally waste years of time fly fishing for hatchery "stockies". Just because it looks like a trout, swims like a trout, smells like a trout, doesn't make it a wild trout. The reason is because even after you take into account all the natural variables and master the preferable disciplines associated with the sport of fly fishing you now have to take into account the unknown human ones.

Wild fish tend to segregate themselves by size to fill every available niche throughout the entire stream stratum. Stockies are all the same size and show a predisposition to school in pools. In Montana it was determined that stocked trout do not act like wild fish. From being raised in the unnatural overcrowding of the raceway they tend to be overly aggressive, attacking not only each other but what wild fish that do exist in the river exhausting the energy of all fish involved.

Stockies genetically pollute wild fish diluting their favorable traits. Hatchery fish tend to stay were you place them, tend to seek hatchery flows, and tend to be imprinted to feed only at hatchery times. Here is a scenario, you could be doing everything right, the perfect match to the hatch, an impeccable cast, etc., etc., but if it is two o'clock and the fish were hatchery fed at four o'clock your wasting your time. You worked your way meticulously upstream through the pool, on every cast your skunked, another angler wades in below you at the tail two hours later and starts nailing fish left and right, that guy becomes the genius, his fly the Holy Grail of patterns. Or say the hatchery employee that fed the fish always wore a red hat, an angler with a red hat could trigger the rise. Another fork in the stream is the overstocking scenario, here a stream or river is so overstocked with incredible amounts of large fish that it would never hold naturally in a million years. Its like fishing in a barrel and limits on these are very liberal (everyone has a chance at the cigar). If these are the only types of water you've ever fished you'll come away with a warped idea of what fly fishing is all about.

It turns fly fishing into a crap shoot, analogous to trying to play cards without a full deck or not having a level playing field. It opens the door to disreputable practices and diminishes the standing and reputation of legitimate guides. The "guide" and I use the term loosely, with a pipeline to a hatchery employee has insider info to where the fish were stocked, (basically fish over there, nod, nod, wink, wink,) this is the ultimate in bad form . Think about it, what kind of sport is it if some "goomer" has to place those fish you’re catching into that river? For me personally, it would add lumps to gravy , if I knew in the back of my mind that the four pound brown I just landed after a three hour stalk was just a worn out, ragged tailed, old hatchery hen that grew up and spent most of its life in a concrete hatchery raceway, and was placed in the river the night before. It diminishes the value of the accomplishment.

Remember Fly Fishing is Fun! If you want a taste of what real fly fishing is like in MONTANA right here in NEW YORK you have arrived at the right site. Trips are designed to get you into some of the best wild fish fly rodding possible, lots of consistent hookups with average sized fish with the real possibility of connecting with a two to four pound trophy.

No Car, No Waders, No Sweat

Don’t have a car? Ride the trains. Just a scenic two hour ride north from Grand Central Terminal, good fly fishing is just a short half hour to forty-five minute drive from Metro North’s Poughkeepsie Station. For an extra fee I’ll pick you up take you out on the stream for 6 hrs of fly fishing (equipment included-summer season wet wading only) and deposit you back at trackside for a welcome restful trip back to the city. If you have waders and want to try fly fishing for spawning stripers we can do this for that fishery also.